Thomas West has a nice post. An excerpt, here :

Rorty’s response to Plato was that there is no escape from the cave, and so there is no point in even making the effort. Rorty’s position seems to have been anticipated in this 1948 remark of Strauss: “People may become so frightened of the ascent to the light of the sun, and so desirous of making that ascent utterly impossible to any of their descendants, that they dig a deep pit beneath the cave in which they were born, and withdraw into that pit.” This use of arguments borrowed from philosophers to deny that philosophy in the Socratic sense is possible or necessary is an old story. It is no accident that the philosophers whose teachings were most influential in the American founding held views closer to the Socratic understanding of philosophy as ascent from the cave (from the smoke of one’s own chimney) than to Rorty’s understanding.